From Alana Goodman: AOC’s chief of staff ran $1 Million slush fund; diverted campaign cash to his own firms

Alana Goodman is a great friend of mine and a great reporter. She recently wrote a disturbing story about two political action committees founded by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide, Saikat Chakrabart.

What did AOC know and when did she know it? I trust her, I think, but the hanger-ons around her need to be carefully monitored.

These two PACs funneled over $1 million in political donations to two of Chakrabart’s private companies, according to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, reads Goodman’s story, which ran in the Washington Examiner.

Here’s more from the story:

The cash transfers from the PACs — overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman socialist Democrat’s chief of staff — run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of “dark money” in politics.

Chakrabarti’s companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used.

The cash transfers from the PACs — overseen by Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman socialist Democrat’s chief of staff — run counter to her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of “dark money” in politics.

Chakrabarti’s companies appear to have been set up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used.

The complaint names Ocasio-Cortez and Chakrabarti as respondents. It asks the FEC to investigate and audit the two PACs, saying they were engaged in an “an elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures.”

Tom Anderson, director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, said: “It appears Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her associates ran an off-the-books operation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus violating the foundation of all campaign finance laws: transparency.”

Chakrabarti, 33, is a Harvard graduate.

To read the whole story, which does not assert nor dismiss that AOC knew what her aide was doing, can be read here. Disclosure: Tom Anderson is a great friend of mine and we did some wild ass shit in Miami, or at least I did after the mild-mannered Anderson went home.

Note: The revolting Washington Post, owned by oligarch Jeffrey “Dahmer” Bezos, as some call him, stole the story, in typical fashion. It reported what the Examiner did without crediting the newspaper or Goodman. The Bezos-owned outlet said only that “a conservative group” — a reference to the excellent National Legal and Policy Center — “filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the PACs failed to properly disclose their spending.”

Fuck the Post and Fuck Bezos. I don’t read the former nor do I buy anything, to my knowledge, that puts money in the latter’s pocket. He’s a rich oligopolist and I hope his wife takes him to the cleaners in their upcoming divorce. The oligarch’s wife appears to be rightly and understandably upset by sext messages the human condom allegedly sent to women. Here’s an excerpt from a newspaper whose name eludes me at the moment:

“I love you, alive girl,” reads one message allegedly sent by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. “I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon.”

This and other messages were published by the National Enquirer in January, soon after Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced their divorce. And the Enquirer promised more: “a cache of lewd selfies taken by Bezos and seen by reporters from The ENQUIRER are so shocking we dare not print them.”

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